Colm O'Gorman: abuse was 'systemic'
Updated on 20 May 2009
Jon Snow talks to Colm O'Gorman, the Executive Director of Amnesty International in Ireland, who was a victim of sexual abuse perpetrated by a Catholic priest as a teenager.
As a damning report is published into "endemic" abuse suffered by children in Irish Catholic institutions over 60 years, Colm O'Gorman tells of being abused by a Catholic priest for two and a half years, and finding out there were suggestions the church knew about the individual abusing other boys.
He says the report is both no surprise, and "horribly, horribly shocking". He says the "systemic and brutal" abuse suffered in these institutions was a "very different reality" for many thousands of children from the idea of the church as about "truth, love, compassion and all things good".
"I think it was systemic, and it was endemic right across that system of care, and indeed right across that institution," he says.
"It meant that there were at every order, at every level within both religious orders and dioceses, church leaders who were more concerned about the cover-up of these crimes and the denial of what was happening, than they were about the welfare of children, and that extended all the way to the Vatican."
